Matrox Parhelia 128MB

Matrox Graphics sat out the last several 3-D shootouts, concentrating instead on its multihead display technologies (where one card powers several monitors); these have done well in the corporate and financial markets. With the release of the Matrox Parhelia 128MB earlier this year, the company has returned to the race, offering a 3-D graphics card that distinguishes itself more by its feature set than by raw performance. Most notable is its ability to drive three CRTs simultaneously and, for some games, to spread the 3-D graphics across the three screens to create what Matrox calls Surround Gaming. The Parhelia is an intriguing product, but its unique features can't overcome its underwhelming 3-D performance.

The Parhelia delivers high-fidelity graphics with its GigaColor technology. Conventional 32-bit color actually consists of 24 bits of color and an 8-bit alpha channel for translucency and transparency. By reallocating the bits to give red, green, and blue 10 bits each, Matrox increases the number of colors from 16.7 million to 1.07 billion. The downside is that only 2 bits remain for alpha blending, which in 3-D games is often insufficient. But for applications where alpha blending isn't critical, this can be a useful feature. Matrox has also implemented filtering circuitry on the Parhelia's eight-layer circuit board to ensure cleaner signal output to display devices. Matrox includes a standalone viewer and a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop that lets you view TIFFs using this format.

Another unique feature of the Parhelia is fragment anti-aliasing, which performs line anti-aliasing instead of applying anti-aliasing techniques to the entire 3-D scene. The card can scan a scene, detect where each object's edges are, and apply anti-aliasing to those edges to reduce or eliminate the stair-stepping (jaggies) often seen in 3-D games. By working only on object edges, which make up just 5 to 10 percent of the on-screen pixels, the Parhelia can apply up to 16X anti-aliasing.

This approach works well, but it isn't compatible with all games. For instance, the new flight simulator IL-2 Sturmovik does not work correctly using fragment anti-aliasing. The Parhelia can also perform traditional supersampling full-scene anti-aliasing, much like what the ATI and nVidia chips use. But the card suffers a considerable performance penalty in this mode, and as our testing showed, frame rates dropped so low that games became all but unplayable.

The most impressive feature of the Parhelia is Surround Gaming, where the card drives three displays simultaneously to create an immersive experience. A Matrox utility called Apptimizer configures supported games to enable the triple-display effect, and the Parhelia comes with all the necessary cables. Of course, this requires three displays, which eats up quite a bit of desktop real estatenot to mention the cost of three monitors. Then there's the matter of performance: The Parhelia has to push around three times as many pixels to drive three displays, and frame rates suffer at times. But it's capable of driving a number of games at 2,400-by-600 (or three screens at 800-by-600); in some cases it can even manage 1,024-by-768 on three screens. You can also use this triple-display mode on the Windows desktop; Matrox's software lets you create setups where certain apps are loaded and placed on specific screens.

The Parhelia's 3-D performance did not stack up well against either the Radeon 9700 Pro or the WinFast Ultra. Its performance on our 1,024-by-768 test runs with 4X anti-aliasing was especially poor. And these tests don't just measure anti-aliasing performance; they also gauge how well each card shoulders a heavy rendering load. The Parhelia's performance suffered because of its relatively slow core GPU clock speed. When we enabled Matrox's fragment anti-aliasing, the card's performance more than doubled. But the Parhelia still trailed the competition when tested with or without any kind of anti-aliasing.

If you need multihead capabilities and you work primarily with 2-D and video-editing applications, the Matrox Parhelia 128MB is worth serious consideration. But if your main desire is the fastest 3-D performance on the planet, look elsewhere.

Dave came to have his insatiable tech jones by way of music—and because his parents wouldn't let him run away to join the circus. After a brief and ill-fated career in professional wrestling, Dave now...

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